Whisper to the Blood (20 page)

"You do groceries well," Jim said to Kate.

"Yes, I do," she said, and looked at Johnny. "Things okay at
school today?"

He hunched a shoulder. "Yeah, fine."

They both looked at him, Jim pausing in the act of loading up dishes for a
trip to the sink. "What?" Kate said.

"It's all anyone is talking about," Johnny said. "I'm a hero
for getting beat up coming up the river. Poor old Mac gets shot and hardly gets
a mention."

Jim started stacking dishes again. "It's a matter of setting
priorities, Johnny. Folks are on the river every day, going hunting, buying
fuel and supplies, visiting relatives, going to basketball games. Safe passage
on the river is essential to the life of the 'Burbs."

"And what's one miner more or less?" Kate said.

"Oh man, Kate," Johnny said in dismay. "That's kind of
harsh."

"Pretty harsh, yeah," she said. "Also true. And, you know,
it's life. Or at least it is around here." She looked at Jim. "Have
you tracked Howie down yet?"

Jim let out a long, heartfelt sigh. "Oh, yeah," he said.
"Howie. No. No, I haven't. He isn't at home, and Willard claims he hasn't
seen him. Of course we all know that Willard can't remember today what happened
yesterday, unless yesterday was Darth Vader's birthday. Howie hasn't been to
the Roadhouse for the last five days, according to Bernie, which fits because
he was supposed to start his shift at the trailer on Monday. You'll remember
that storm we had just before Thanksgiving?"

"No tracks?" Kate said.

Jim gave a gloomy nod. "No tracks."

"Who's out there now?"

"At the trailer? FNG name of Gallagher."

"What?" Johnny said, looking up from his trig homework.

Jim looked at him. "Talia Macleod hired Howie and a new guy, a Dick
Gallagher, to babysit her trailer a week on, a week off. This was supposed to
be Howie's week."

Johnny opened his mouth and Kate said, "Is he armed?"

"I didn't ask. He's a fool if he isn't. And Macleod would probably
insist." He hesitated.

"What?" she said. "You want me to find Howie for you?"

He gave an irritated wave of his hand. "No, I'll find Howie. I always
find Howie whether I want to or not."

"Uh . . . ," Johnny said.

"No," Jim said, "I want you to go talk to the villagers for
me."

"But you already have."

"Come on, Kate. They'll say things to you that they won't say to
me."

"Oh. You think the highwaymen have to be the Johansens because that's
who Art Riley said they were. Even if he couldn't identify them."

He winced. "Please don't call them that. People'll start romanticizing
them, think they wear cocked hats and carry swords and fall in love with the
landlord's daughter, and the next thing you know there'll be stories about them
robbing from the rich to give to the poor."

"Okay," she said obligingly, "you think Art's right about who
the assholes on the snow machines are."

He nodded. "If not know, then suspect. Hell, don't you? Maybe the
Kaltaks or Ike saw something. Find me an eyewitness and I'll lock up those
sonsabitches and throw away the key."

"Usual rates?"

He grumbled. "Yeah, fine. You're getting to be my single biggest budget
item, Shugak."

She batted her eyelashes. "But you know I'm worth it."

Johnny opened his mouth for the third time and Jim said, "You got a
mouth on you, Shugak, I'll give you that. A disease for which there is only one
known cure." He leaned forward and kissed her.

Johnny made the obligatory gagging noises and departed for less saccharine
climes, otherwise known as his room.

It was furnished in a style Kate called Late American Adolescent, which is
to say that the original of no horizontal or vertical surface showed through
the clutter of clothes, shoes, boots, books, toys, posters, gadgets, CDs, DVDs,
truck parts, snow machine parts, four-wheeler parts, notebooks,
X-Men
comic books, but only the ones written by Joss Whedon, used bowls containing
leftovers in a communicable state of congealment, and many different varieties
of shampoo, deodorant, shaving cream, pimple unguent, and cologne, all of which
had been used once before being tossed aside in favor of the next new thing.

Not on view was the pile of
Penthouse
and
Playboy
magazines that both he and Kate pretended she didn't know were under the head
of his bed. Not that she ever came in here anyway. "Your room, your
mess," she had said cheerfully when they moved in. "My prime request,
which I do last pronounce, is that anything that breeds in there? Stays in
there."

He cleared his bed by the simple expedient of lifting one corner of the
tangled spread and shaking it. Everything on it fell, slid, or crashed to the
floor, and he flopped down on his back to stare at the ceiling.

So Doyle-Dick-had scored a job with Talia Macleod. That was good. "It
is good," he said to the ceiling.

He tried to remember some of the stuff they'd talked about over the night
and day they'd spent in the cab of that semi, more than two years ago now. He'd
been homesick and filled with longing for the clean, cold air, the lack of
crowds, the empty roads, the silence. Yes, he'd raved about
Alaska
, he remembered that much, and
evidently Doyle-Dick!-had believed every word. Well, why not? Johnny hadn't
lied.

He was worried, though.
Alaska
wasn't easy. It was beautiful enough to break your heart, but there was a
price. It didn't tolerate fools gladly. "Suicide by Alaska," Kate
called it whenever a cheechako did something particularly stupid that got them
killed, like planting a tent on a known bear trail, or moving into the backcountry
with no experience in a subsistence lifestyle, or climbing Denali without a
radio, or taking off in an overgrossed chartered floatplane for a fishing trip
that ended with the people inside as bait.

Dick was tough, though. You didn't spend years driving an eighteen-wheeler
across country without learning how to take care of yourself.

Johnny still hadn't told Kate about Dick being in the Park, much less about
him changing his name. That was partly because she went into orbit every time
he mentioned his hitchhiking home that August. But he'd had to do it, there was
no other way to get home, and he'd had to get home.

If he'd still been living in
Anchorage
he could have tolerated living with his mother, too, but Jane had dumped him
with his grandparents. He'd met them twice in his life before that, and they
lived on a golf course, for crying out loud! Who lived on a golf course? Nobody
under seventy-five, that was for sure. It might not have been so bad if he'd
been old enough to drive, the country looked interesting farther out, but there
he was, stuck between the golf course and school. He had nothing in common with
the kids in his classes, he wasn't into sports or shopping. In the summer you
couldn't even go outside or the heat would come down on you like a sledgehammer.
You couldn't even breathe in heat like that.

It wasn't like he hadn't asked his mom, repeatedly, if he could come home.
His appeals had gone unanswered, and his grandparents hardly spoke to him. The
three of them never sat down to a meal together except when they went out to
Denny's for the senior special. There had been a bunch of Stouffer's frozen
dinners in the freezer, cereal and Top Ramen in the cupboard, milk in the
refrigerator, and bananas in a bowl on the counter, and that was it. He'd felt
like he was starving to death.

That August night he had left the house well after midnight, a daypack over
his shoulder filled with clean underwear and every penny he had. It wasn't
much, and, he was ashamed to remember, the sum had included two twenty-dollar
bills he'd stolen out of his grandmother's purse. The first thing he'd done
after Kate gained legal title to him and it was okay to tell them where he was
was to borrow forty bucks from her and enclose it with a card, apologizing for
the theft.

They hadn't answered. That was okay with him, because it indicated a
reassuring lack of interest in having him back.

He got his first ride on a pickup full of Hispanic day laborers, heading up
to Wickenburg looking for work. His second ride had been the drunken car
salesman, and the less remembered about that brief ride the better. His third
had been Doyle Greenbaugh-Dick Gallagher, dammit-at that truck stop just
outside
Phoenix
on Interstate 10. They'd swung right through
Utah
,
left and up through
Idaho
, cut across the
northeastern corner of
Oregon
, and he'd gotten
off in
Seattle
.
There had been a lot of stops, it seemed as if Dick- that's right,
Dick-couldn't see a truck stop without stopping to say hi to somebody.
"Half a mo, kid," he'd say, shoving the semi into neutral with a
grind of gears, yanking on the parking brake, and giving Johnny a broad wink.
"I see a friend I hafta say hi to."

After that, it was easy. He'd taken a bus to the border, walked into
Canada
, and
hitched a series of rides on RVs. Most of them were with older retired couples,
which got tricky a couple of times when they'd ask where his parents were. It
was lucky he was tall and looked older than he was. Mostly they believed him
when he told them he was eighteen, although one woman had demanded to see some
identification. He pleaded time in the John and skinnied over the KOA
campground fence just in time to hitch a ride with another trucker, this one
hauling building materials to
Fairbanks
.
He was an incurious, middle-aged man who sang along to country-western music,
which got tiresome after a while.

He walked into Alaska, avoiding the border crossing at Beaver Creek by
sneaking around through the woods and catching a ride on the other side with a
couple of moose hunters, who gave him a ride and a meal and let him sleep in
the cab of their pickup in exchange for chopping wood for their campfire that
night. In Ahtna, the fuel truck had been making its fall run into the Park, and
he caught a ride on it to the turnoff to Kate's cabin.

And he'd been here ever since.

But it was that long ride Dick Gallagher-say it again, Dick Gallagher-had
given him that had set the tone of his journey home. He owed Dick a great deal.
They weren't best friends or anything but nevertheless Johnny felt the heavy
responsibility of a debt unpaid.

He wasn't proud of thinking it, but he hoped the nut with the gun really had
been aiming at Mac.

THIRTEEN

J
im and Johnny left early the next
morning, one for work, the other for school. Kate busied herself with packing
up for the trip, extra clothing, food, tent. She didn't know how long she'd be
gone, and while she expected the usual Bush welcome mat, if things got awkward
she wanted to be able to survive a night or two out on her own.

Rifle, ammunition. A lot of ammunition.

Then she traded the rifle for the 12-gauge pump action. If the
highwaymen-excuse her-if the assholes on snow machines wanted to rob her,
they'd have to get close to do it. Nobody got close to the business end of a
shotgun, not if they were sane.

She loaded everything into the trailer, hooked it to the sled, donned bib
overalls, boots, parka, and gloves.

She stood in front of the map for a while, running the sequence of the
attacks through her mind.

So far, all the attacks had been downriver, south of Niniltna, south of the
Nabesna Mine turnoff, south even of where the road left the river to go to the
Roadhouse.

First attack, a mile north of Double Eagle.

Second, three days later, six miles downriver from the first attack, just
outside Chulyin.

Third, a little north of Red Run, six days later and twenty miles farther
south, almost where the Gruening River met the Kanuyaq.

Fourth, thirteen days later, three miles north of Red Run.

Three of four of the attacks had been made on people coming home fat,
trailers loaded with groceries, clothes, parts, fuel. Which made a case for
Johnny and Van and Ruthe being a target of opportunity.

It also opened up the possibility that someone upriver was alerting the
jackals as to potential pickings, at least for the first three attacks. Kate
didn't like the thought of that, not one little bit.

"I think they cruised us on the way out," Johnny had said.
"There were three guys on snow machines who kind of harassed us that
morning. Didn't jump us, just did circles around us and then took off when they
saw a truck coming. I knew there was something off about them, but it didn't
hit me until later. They were wearing helmets, Kate."

"So you couldn't see who they were."

"And nobody wears helmets on the river, Kate." He'd managed a
smile, even if it had looked a little worn around the edges. "Not even an
old safety-first girl like you."

Ten minutes later she was moving down the road, Mutt on the seat in back of
her, headlight illuminating the road in front of her.

Auntie Vi was up in her net loft mending nets, bone needle whipping in and
out, gear swiftly and almost miraculously made whole again. "Ha,
Katya," she said.

"Morning, Auntie." Before Auntie Vi could get started in
Association business Kate got her oar in first. "You hear about the
attacks on the river?"

Auntie Vi gave an emphatic nod. "Sure. Everybody hear."

"I didn't," Kate said.

Auntie Vi looked surprised. Kate, watching her closely, thought the surprise
was exaggerated. "How not?" Auntie Vi said.

"Nobody told me. Why didn't you?"